Congratulations to Fr. Joseph Jianmin Bai, who defended his doctoral dissertation on April 28th! His topic was "Alasdair MacIntyre on Common Goods and Practical Reason," and his director was Associate Professor V. Bradley Lewis, Dean of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.
Jianmin Bai was born and raised in Hebei Province, China. He received his Ph.B., S.T.B., and Ph.L./M.A. in Philosophy from the Ecclesiastical Faculties in the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines, in 2008, 2011, and 2013. From 2013-2017, he served as the parochial vicar in his home diocese and at the same time taught philosophy as a guest lecturer in Hebei Seminary. In 2017, he came to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at The Catholic University of America, U.S.A.
Dissertation Abstract:
According to Alasdair MacIntyre, contemporary moral philosophy is in crisis. Widespread disagreements in everyday practice about questions such as social justice, abortion, euthanasia, and the nature of autonomy and good are in turn mirrored by equally interminable disagreements among moral philosophers working in the utilitarian, Kantian, and contractarian traditions. The disputes have become interminable and sterile in terms of their arguments, for each contending party appears to merely build on their own assertions, prerational attitudes, and commitments. One outcome of the widespread disagreements is the contemporary individualistic moral culture that MacIntyre calls the morality of constrained desire satisfaction. This situation seems to be just what the emotivists and their expressivist heirs have described. However, expressivism lacks the resources to adjudicate among conflicting desires because of the lack of some rationally justifiable and independent criterion or standard.
To go beyond the liberal individualist and rule-centered morality and the inadequacy of emotivism/expressivism, MacIntyre reintroduces the importance of telos and virtues in moral enquiry and performance. In After Virtue, he reconstructs a sociologically teleological account of virtue ethics while rejecting Aristotle’s anthropological teleology. The notions of good and virtues are explicated in terms of social practices, the narrative unity of life, and tradition/s. In developing his thought, MacIntyre gradually realizes that adequate conceptions of virtues and the good life are not just a matter of social construction, but also truths inseparable from how human beings are essentially. In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre revises his previous view about morality purely in social terms by integrating a normative account of ethics grounded in natural teleology.
In his most recent work, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre adds considerable details to his conception of practices by linking them to an account of common goods. The common goods in question are made up of the ends of practices and the participants involved. He proposes his Neo-Aristotelian morality of common goods as an alternative to the morality of constrained desire satisfaction. The nature of good, especially the common goods, underlies the social and political nature of human beings. According to MacIntyre, common goods are to be understood as the goods of practices in local and particular communities and groups. Moreover, the common good of a community is the rank-ordering of such common goods, which is to say an arrangement of practices. Thus, to understand human flourishing requires apprehending the proper relation between common goods and individual goods. This dissertation examines MacIntyre’s account of common goods and practical reason by studying the relationships of human action with moral rules, virtues, the objectivity andsociality of good, and human flourishing as the final telos.